Austin Maliszewski's Blog

At Payton, we use Ghost to help us administer all the client PCs in the building. Each family of PCs gets its own image (with some minor variations since certain departments require specialized software that can’t be easily managed using GPOs) which is deployed every few months from a central server with multicast.

In the past, we’ve always booted the PCs with Ghost Boot CDs which allowed them to connect to the GhostCast Session. We didn’t have good luck with Ghost Console working properly, so we always did it this way. (Though I really want to start using WDS). However, recently, we acquired 100 notebook PCs that don’t have optical drives. Obviously, this was a problem. We were either going to have to use a USB CD drive or a USB floppy and neither would have been pretty for imaging 100 PCs.

There are several ways of network booting for Ghost. I’m going to go over two ways. One is with all free or shareware software and the other, is the way we ended up doing it and that’s with 3Com Boot Services since Symantec Ghost 8 Corporate includes it. Let me say that that software is a piece of work. It has a UI dating from the Windows 3.11 days. However, it actually works, when you get around its quirkiness. (I picked the 3Com route because you can configure the PXE server to run in DHCP Proxy mode which was critical since we don’t have any control over the DHCP server.)

Instead of me going over everything with the free/shareware software way, let me just provide a link. His instructions are great and got me a working setup. (Just don’t use any of the included software, it’s a few years out of date). Link from Damian Jackson at Lilydale Heights College. Point of Interest: The only drive letter that the Ghost Boot Wizard is willing to work with for creating the floppy image is A:/. You might need to disable your system’s actual floppy drive if you’re not using real disks (or don’t have physical access to the server). That took me hours to figure out.

It’s also probably not worth me going over the 3Com Boot Services way since it comes with a perfectly good manual on the CD. However, there are a few things which are covered in the manual, but not inherently obvious if you don’t read the manual. The rest is straight forward and you probably won’t have to read the manual. This is the brief version of everything.

First off, you need to create a Network Boot Image using the Ghost Boot Wizard. You can probably figure this out. Make sure to use the PXE Network Driver. I made two images. One has no command line parameters (which I called Ghost Manual) and the other has the parameters “-ja=[sessionname] -sure” where [sessionname] is equal to the name we use for our GhostCasting sessions. This I called Ghost Automatic since it automatically connects to the session.

Now you need to prep 3Com Boot Services. On your Start Menu under 3Com Boot Services is the 3Com Boot Image Editor. Open that up and select “Create a PXE menu boot file”. Create your menu file. Here’s what mine looks like.

PXE Boot Menu in 3Com Boot Image Editor

When you’re done go ahead and save it. You can name it if you like or just leave it as “mba.pxe”. The next step is to edit the BOOTPTAB file. Which you can do by opening the appropriately named BOOTPTAB Editor. This whole BOOTPTAB thing is a little clunky. The default BOOTPTAB file has a couple of entries. Go ahead and nuke those. Now, go to Edit and Add Host. This is where it gets a little weird. This is how you fill it out:

Adding a new host into BOOTPTAB

Yes, those are really question marks. You can also specify a MAC address, but putting in all question marks serves as a wildcard to allow all clients. Hit “Ok.” Now your BOOTPTAB file should look like this:

Sample Configuration

Go ahead and save that. Now, you can launch the PXE Server and the TFTP Server. (Both must be running. You can make them services if you’d like.) When you first launch the PXE Server it will check to see if the PC you’re running it on is a DHCP server. If it’s not, it will ask you if you’d like it to be a DHCP Proxy. Tell it that you would. You’re all done on the server side.

Now, go to one of your client PCs and tell it to boot from LAN. If you did everything correctly, you’ll get a menu that looks something like this (depending on your configuration).

PXE Boot Menu

Happy Ghosting!

I recently discovered this program by Bartels Media, a German software company, called MaxiVista. Despite the name, this has nothing at all to do with Windows Vista. It’s actually a really neat multimonitor package that allows you to use old laptops/computers as a secondary, tertiary, etc., monitor for your main PC/Laptop.

I have this configured with two monitors connected to one of my main laptops (I have two main laptops, one that leaves the house with me and one that doesn’t.). Then I have MaxiVista setup using an older laptop as a third monitor. This gives me a total of three monitors of screen space.

Quite frankly, I’m impressed with this program. There’s no latency between the monitors. I wouldn’t show video over the third monitor, but, it might actually work. I even pulled iTunes over to the third display and coverplay ran, albeit a little blocky, but it ran. Take that, Remote Desktop. Right now, I’m typing this message with Firefox in the third monitor, so that’s working nicely. I thought having two monitors was nice, but having three is really incredible. When I build my new desktop, it will probably have three or four (depending on how far over budget I run) monitors on two dual head video cards with 1GB DDR3 VRAM each. I haven’t decided which ones yet, though.

I just had to share this really neat program. I forgot exactly where I read about it, otherwise I’d give credit. Link: http://www.maxivista.com

I finally got around to installing Vista on my Gateway CX2724. I made a pledge to wait until at least SP1 and since that’s here, I did it. I pulled a copy of Vista Business from MSDN, burned it to DVD, resized my XP Tablet PC partition with GPartEd on Knoppix and installed it. The installation process was pretty painless. Put in your product key, time zone, if you want it to automatically update, it installs everything, about 30 minutes later, you put in your new username and password and it’s done. It rebooted a final time. Loaded, and well, it’s pretty and seems to run pretty nicely, etc.

First thing I notice, the pen doesn’t work. Well, I knew that would happen. Connected it to my WiFi and went and downloaded the pen drivers from Gateway.com. (Well, I downloaded Firefox first.) I installed the drivers based on the HWID of the HID. Then I installed the Tablet Buttons drivers based on its HWID. And what do you know, I point the pen at the screen and the mouse moves. Well, it’s a good deal away from where it should be. I fiddled with Calibration which failed every time. I decided I should do Windows Update, so I go do that, and in my list of updates are drivers for the pen device. Well, it does its thing and an hour later, I’m prompted to reboot. It tells me that the updates for the pen device failed, which makes sense since I already had the newest drivers. Upon reboot, everything works perfectly.

This morning, I played with it a bit more. I tried out the Input Panel. Boy, the handwriting recognition is so much greater than XP TPE. It could make everything I threw at it. I wrote in cursive, manuscript, mixed it up (that is pseudocursive), neatly, messily, it could read it all. It even got my name. I had to wait until about 4 o’clock before I could download OneNote because MSDN was being updated. Loaded up OneNote and did some sample

The way OneNote’s handwriting recognition works is based on the OS it’s running on. It makes a hook to the host OS’s handwriting recognition API if it has one. It installs TPE’s if you’re running it on any version of XP besides TPE, and on Vista it uses the native API except on Home Basic which doesn’t have one. (This is to the best of my knowledge, not sure if 2007 still works that way). So, handwriting recognition worked nicely, again recognizing everything I threw at it.

The best part is it’s supposed to learn your handwriting and improve over time kind of like the way Speech to Test works now. Well, we’ll see.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with the way Vista and Tablet PCs work. In the near future I should be getting a new Tablet (HP tx2525nr) with Vista Ultimate which should be a pleasure to work with.

Another thing: If anyone has computer questions, shoot me an email. I fix/can help with PCs (XP, Vista), Macs (OS X), *nix boxes, networking, servers, and hardware problems. Oh yeah, I also do programming and web design.